The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Michel Richard of Villard Michel Richard

I have just bitten into a warm, divine pain au chocolat at the French chef’s majestic new venture, Villard Michel Richard, inside the recently overhauled New York Palace hotel, and he is quick to brush the eruption of golden flakes from my skirt.

It is one of the coldest mornings of the year and Richard does not remove the scarf wrapped around his neck for the duration of our interview. His Tumi luggage sits beside my feet. When we are done chatting, he will hightail it to Penn Station for the Acela to his longtime home of Washington, D.C.—where locals return again and again for his playful food at Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant Central Michel Richard (there’s a Las Vegas outpost at Caesars Palace, too). It’s also the city where Richard made waves with his now-shuttered flagship, Citronelle, at the Latham hotel in Georgetown. “I need to go see my wife,” he says.

These days, much of Richard’s time is spent in New York, where up the hotel’s grand staircase diners will find the Gallery at Villard. In a world where tiny, casual neighborhood joints command three-hour waits, the eight-course, $185 tasting menu at Gallery is a jarring throwback to fine dining. By contrast, the Bistro, with its sexy wine cube and gilded ceiling, is a more accessible—and no less striking—spot to fill up on mini gougères, salmon surrounded by braised lentils, and Richard’s famed sous-vide fried chicken, served boneless over mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Pomme Palais is the brightly lit grab-and-go bakery where you can buy turkey meatball sandwiches and Parmesan palmiers.

If people want to meet me, I’m at Villard. I want to feed them and make them fatter.

This marks Richard’s second go-round in New York. He first arrived in 1974, from Paris, where he worked beside acclaimed pâtissier Gaston Lenôtre, who was eager to open his first pastry shop stateside. “I was paying $200 a month to live on Queens Boulevard and 59th Street,” Richard recalls. “I was young, ambitious, and dreaming of being successful, except the shop didn’t succeed; Monsieur Lenôtre closed. But I didn’t want to go back to France.”

Growing up in Brittany, Richard knew he wanted to be a chef early on: “My father was a baker, but my parents divorced when I was very young and I don’t remember him at all. My mother was not a great chef, but she worked in a factory and cooked for us five kids all the time. As the second oldest, I also had to prepare food for my siblings. I made jam with peaches from the trees in the garden, and my mother used to give me 10 francs so I could buy steak and potatoes every Thursday. At nine, I was sautéing steak with butter for my brother and sister. When I was eight or nine, a kid took me to his father’s restaurant, and from the back door I could see all the chapeaux and the flambéing, and I fell in love with it. It became my dream to work in my own kitchen.”

Los Angeles allowed Richard to plant the seeds of his own restaurant empire. There, he opened Michel Richard, followed by French-Californian mash-up Citrus, which paved the way for his arrival in D.C. Central Michel Richard made such a splash on the capital’s dining scene, it garnered a James Beard award for Best New Restaurant in 2008.

New Yorkers may not be as familiar with Richard, nor his affinity for texture and clever presentation, but he is eager to make their acquaintance. “If they want to meet me, I’m at Villard,” he says. “I want to feed them and make them fatter.”

Here, Richard discusses 10 of the dishes—including many his own creations—that have helped him straddle the line between French and American cooking for the past four decades.

Pastry cream

It was September 1, 1962, and it was my first day as an apprentice at a patisserie in Champagne. They told me to make the pastry cream, and I thought, What is that? I learned quickly. The evolution of my recipe has been nice. I used to do it with milk, and sometimes with orange juice or strawberries. Now when I make a pastry cream—we do a lot of éclairs—I use four or five eggs depending upon how rich I want it. I stick it in the microwave, take it out, and whip it, and then put it back in again. I’ve been making pastry cream for 51 years.

Potatoes

I love potatoes because you can do so many different things with them—make them crunchy, or make them into a soft purée. When I became a chef, one of my signature dishes was a potato basket, in which I wrapped julienned potato strands around a cucumber and then deep-fried it. You could fill it with mushrooms, a salad, even more potatoes—like my nuggets. There are maybe 2,000 different kinds of potatoes out there, but I probably only use three or four.

KFC

When I was a kid who had just moved to New York, I ate at a Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time because I didn’t have a lot of money. I loved the crispiness and moisture of the chicken in the bucket. We didn’t do that in France; ours was skinny and soft. It’s not that KFC tasted so great, but the fried chicken was just so crispy, and it inspired my own recipe. I don’t remember what sides I ate on that visit because they weren’t crunchy.

Salad Niçoise

Salad Niçoise is served in brasseries all over the South of France, but I was from the north so it was rare I ate it—I was broke and couldn’t afford to go to the special restaurant where it was on the menu. When I went to a sushi bar and they served me raw tuna I had the idea it would be good to use in a Niçoise with vegetables from the garden. People love it with fresh tuna instead of canned.

Filet mignon burger

I make tuna burgers and lobster burgers, but I also make filet mignon burgers. Before I put it on the olive oil bread I cut it into four strips, just like a steak. I add a slice of tomato and onion mayonnaise. It’s perfect if you want the taste of steak but don’t want to spend the time cutting it.

Kataifi

I used to work in Greece, when I was around 20. I found some very thin pastas there—thin, thin macaroni like my hair— that I loved. I also loved kataifi, the shredded phyllo dough that appears on so many desserts there. Years ago, in a market in Los Angeles, I found a package of frozen kataifi. We decided to wrap it around shrimp, then deep-fry it. I coat scallops with kataifi, too—porcupine scallops. It creates an elegant crunch.

Raspberry sorbet

I put fresh raspberries that have been frozen in a food processor. It whirs, and then I have sorbet. I add a bit of sugar, too, to make sure it’s edible, but we don’t need a ton. All you need is the fruit.

Pearl pasta

When I was living in Los Angeles, I went to a Jewish store and noticed something that looked like regular couscous but wasn’t; it was Israeli couscous. I thought, What is that?I took it back to my kitchen and the little balls rolled in my mouth. That is how I created the risotto at Citronelle. The pearl pasta and squid ink made it seem like you were eating caviar.

Eggs

I like playing with eggs. Sometimes the shell becomes a container for a ‘yolk’ of puréed yellow tomatoes and a ‘white’ of mozzarella and gelatin. Sometimes the eggshell is white chocolate with a lemon meringue ‘yolk.’ I make scrambled scallops mimicking the consistency of a scrambled egg that are a surprise, too.

Gelatin

Gelatin is underrated. I take some orange juice and a little bit of gelatin and whip that in a KitchenAid mixer. Under the bowl I have ice and water to keep it cool. Without the addition of eggs, you have a perfect mousse. It’s a nice, light, cold dessert in which you can add any ingredient you may want—like coffee.

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